The top 10 human spaceflight missions to look out for this decade
The 2020s in human spaceflight are looking wildly different than the previous decade. Gone are the days of the US paying Russia for astronaut rides on their Soyuz, since the space shuttle was decomissioned in 2011. Now, countless private ventures in association with SpaceX have taken a foothold. Let’s take a look at the top 10 moments in spaceflight we’ll see this decade.
1. Polaris Dawn (early 2024)
In September 2021, Jared Isaacman — the CEO of a digital currency transaction app — went on the first orbital tourism voyage aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, with 3 other crewmates. The mission dubbed “Inspiration4” remained in space for several days, raising money for a chilren’s hospital and conducting experiments.
Initially, Isaacman thought his space oddessy was over, however he entertained the idea of a successor to Inspiration4. In 2022 he announced the Polaris Program, aimed to achieve several extremely ambitious milestones. In essence, it is Isaacman’s personal Gemini program, and the first private space program. He booked 3 missions with SpaceX, each with escalatingly ambitious goals.
Polaris Dawn is the first of these 3 missions, Polaris II is the second, and Polaris III is the third (which will be the first crewed Starship launch). Polaris Dawn itself will involve Isaacman and 3 other private astronauts riding on a SpaceX Falcon 9 to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). However, this will be the highest Earth orbit that has been achieved in over 50 years.
It will fly to almost 1400km, the ISS flies at a mere 400 kilometers and orbit itself starts at around 160km. In fact, it actually gets close to leaving LEO entirely. Additionally, it is high enough to the point where the crew crosses into the Van Der Allen radiation belt. With this, the crew will conduct 38 radiation and health related experiments that will advance humanity’s knowledge of radiation and human health in both space and on the ground better. Plus, it’ll be the first test of Starlink laser communications in space, potentially improving communications between Earth and departing spacecraft.
However by far the most tantalizing aspect of Dawn is the fact that the crew will conduct an EVA, meaning they suit up in SpaceX suits and two of them will leave the Dragon spacecraft. This would be the first ever private spacewalk and make huge strides in developing suits for moon missions.
Illustration of the Polaris Dawn spacewalk
After 5 days, they will enter Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds protected by Dragon’s heat shield. The mission is going to be an ambitious step forward for human spaceflight.
2. DearMoon (2025)
In 2017, Elon Musk announced that he will be sending a crew to do a lunar flyby as part of a tourism mission in a Dragon spacecraft that would ride on a Falcon Heavy in 2018 by Yusaku Maezawa. However, this was upgraded to instead fly 8 passengers on Starship (then BFR) and scheduled for 2023.
The project objective is to have eight passengers travel with Maezawa for free around the Moon on a six-day tour. Maezawa expects that the experience of space tourism will inspire the accompanying passengers in the creation of something new. The art would be exhibited some time after returning to Earth to help promote peace around the world.
Unless the crew is suicidal, then the mission is unlikely to take place this year. There are a number of milestones until Starship is ready to take on the 8-strong crew of influencers and YouTubers.
This year, SpaceX needs to knock off one or two more flight tests for Starship. Next year, it’ll need to start regularly flying Starship instead of the Falcon 9 to deliver Starlink, SpaceX’s ambitious satellite mega constellation. The successful flying of Starship for these uncrewed missions (several times a month) ensures SpaceX officials would be confident that people can ride the rocket without it exploding. Only then will Polaris III, the first crewed Starship launch, take place. Then SpaceX would be ready to fly DearMoon. This indicates 2025 is more of a placeholder date, and nobody really knows when it will fly, but it’s likely to be between 2026–2028.
3. Polaris II (2026)
This mission will be the second mission of the Polaris Program and involve Jared Isaacman and 3 crewmates ascending to LEO in a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Not much is known about the mission, however Isaacman said he was looking forward to learning more about it towards the end of 2023.
However currently it is going to “build on the successes of Polaris Dawn” and is shaping up to a mission that boosts the Hubble Space Telescope to a higher and more stable orbit and also have an astronaut or two leave the Crew Dragon and service it — something that last happened with the space shuttle in 2009.
4. Tom Cruise’s mission (2024–26)
This mission is especially exciting since it involves Tom Cruise going to the ISS and shooting a movie there — where he will be the first civillian to do a spacewalk on the station.
Let’s back up a bit. NASA wanted to select a space company a few years back to send private astronauts and tourists to the space station for short stays aboard a Falcon 9 Crew Dragon. They chose Axiom Space. Their current plan is to send two crews to the ISS at a twice per year cadence as they learn how to deal with the ISS, since they will be attaching their own modules every year starting 2025. After they have completed expanding the ISS, their modules will break off from the station and form an independent space station. NASA also chose Axiom for the creation of the spacesuits that Artemis astronauts will walk on the moon with and it’s likely that Tom Cruise will hop on the ISS via this option.
It’s either this or he will ride a Soyuz to the station as a spaceflight participant, but this was mostly done in the 2000s when there was no other option for tourism.
They’ve already started operations. In 2022, Ax-1 lifted off carrying 4 astronauts. Then, this year, Ax-2 lifted off carrying a private astronaut, a tourist and two Saudi governmental astronauts. The next 2 missions are scheduled for next year.
The crew for Ax-4 has not yet been announced (scheduled for August 2024), but it is suspected that it may include Tom Cruise. He is working on a massive blockbuster film where he, at the climax, ascends to the ISS and does a spacewalk. It is unknown if the entire crew is dedicated to the movie, or only Tom Cruise and perhaps an assistant to do camera work.
However, there have also been concerns of delays and that the mission may take place on a later one — for instance Axiom 5 or 6.
With the film yet to enter production, it’s unlikely that one will be unveiled anytime soon. Plus, Cruise has a second Mission to un-Impossible before he starts work on anything new, with Dead Reckoning Part Two coming to cinemas in 2024. With this in mind, it could be 2025 or 2026 before Cruise’s space epic lands in our orbit.
4. Polaris III (2027)
Polaris 3 is booked to be the final mission of the Polaris Program, culminating in the first ever crewed Starship launch. It may carry a crew of 6–8, considering its large interior volume.
Other details are unknown at the moment, but it is sure to be a very exciting mission that will make headlines worldwide.
5. Tito’s mission (2029)
Dennis Tito has booked a Starship flight, the second that will circle the moon, after DearMoon. It will carry him and his sister along with more crewmates that are yet to be announced. These extremely exciting missions emphasize the growing uses of Starship.
Dennis and Akiko Tito are the first two crewmembers announced on Starship’s second commercial spaceflight around the Moon. This will be Dennis’ second mission to space after becoming the first commercial astronaut to visit the International Space Station in 2001, and Akiko will be among the first women to fly around the Moon on a Starship. The Titos joined the mission to contribute to SpaceX’s long-term goal to advance human spaceflight and help make life multiplanetary.
Over the course of a week, Starship and the crew will travel to the Moon, fly within 200 km of the Moon’s surface, and complete a full journey around the Moon before safely returning to Earth. This mission is expected to launch after the Polaris Program’s first flight of Starship and dearMoon.
6. Artemis 2 (November 2024)
This will be the first crewed flight of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket developed solely by NASA. It will be the agency’s return to the moon since Apollo, Artemis being its direct successor. But this time, NASA is coming to stay, and envisions bases on the surface and a space station above called Gateway that will orbit the moon with a crew onboard to replace the ISS.
Artemis 2 is in many ways the governmental equivalent of DearMoon, and its crew was announced in April 2023, causing a media blitz as the world got to know the 4 pioneers that will travel around the moon and back in preparation for a crewed landing later in the decade.
This will probably be one of the most influential space missions this decade and will reignite public interest in space exploration due to the media coverage it’ll recieve.
7. Vast-1 (August 2025)
While Axiom Space has more ambitious plans for its space station, it won’t be the first commercial space station in orbit. That title goes to Haven-1, a small upcoming space station in LEO that will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket created by aerospace company Vast.
The mission will be the first stay to Haven-1 and will last for a month, before the crew of 4 returns to Earth. During the mission, the propulsion systems will cause the station to rotate, providing artificial gravity. This is exciting as it is the first time since Gemini 11 a spacecraft would spin, and thus provide levels of gravity comparable to that you’d experience on the moon.
It won’t be permanently crewed and will require flights and crew rotations from Crew Dragon to stay aloft, however it will still be the third space station in orbit.
Vast announced today that SpaceX will launch what is expected to be the world’s first commercial space station, known as Vast Haven-1, quickly followed by two human spaceflight missions to said space station. Scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket to low-Earth orbit no earlier than August 2025. Haven-1 will be a fully-functional independent space station and eventually be connected as a module to a larger Vast space station currently in development.
Upon launch of Haven-1, Falcon 9 will launch Vast’s first human spaceflight mission to the commercial space station, Vast-1. Dragon and its four-person crew will dock with Haven-1 for up to 30 days while orbiting Earth. Vast also secured an option for an additional human spaceflight mission to the station aboard a Dragon spacecraft.
The Vast-1 crew selection process is underway and the crew will be announced at a future date. Once finalized, SpaceX will provide crew training on Falcon 9 and the Dragon spacecraft, emergency preparedness, spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises, as well as partial and full mission simulations including docking and undocking for return to Earth.
Vast’s long-term goal is to develop a 100-meter-long multi-module spinning artificial gravity space station launched by SpaceX’s Starship transportation system. In support of this, Vast will explore conducting the world’s first spinning artificial gravity experiment on a commercial space station with Haven-1.
This new partnership between Vast and SpaceX will continue to create and accelerate greater accessibility to space and more opportunities for exploration on the road to making humanity multiplanetary.
8. Gaganyaan-3 (2025)
This will be the first manned mission of the Indian Human Spaceflight Program. The first two Gaganyaan missions will be either uncrewed or have a humanoid robot onboard and both will launch in 2024, this one will carry 3 Indian astronauts to an orbit of 400 kilometers for several days ending with a splashdown in the ocean, riding on the ISRO’s LMV3 rocket.
If successful, India would be the fourth to independently launch people into space and would be a historic milestone, kicking off a follow-up program to make their own space station — and then followed by lunar landings and interplanetary travel in the long term.
9. Artemis 3 (December 2025)
Currently, Artemis 3 is supposed to be the first lunar landing since the Apollo program, however this may not actually happen. Starship is the chosen lander and will not be ready to even support human travel by 2025, let alone a complex moon landing. Industry observors have said that it may take until 2026–28 for it to be ready for Artemis 3, and NASA can’t just go a full 4 years without any flight.
At one point prior to a lunar landing, SpaceX must send an uncrewed Starship to land on the moon to demonstrate to NASA it can safely carry astronauts.
NASA’s gateway station may be the destination of Artemis 3 — but it right now remains a lunar landing mission
This means that NASA may be forced to do something else for the mission rather than a landing. Considering Artemis 2 is already doing a flyby, this one may be a crewed visit to the Gateway space station, a station in orbit around the moon. It will be interesting to see, and will again launch aboard an SLS.
However currently Artemis 3 is a mission that will take two astronauts to land on the lunar surface and stay there for around a week, while the other 2 astronauts remain in orbit. SpaceX’s Starship development may advance faster than we think and knock off obstacles allowing for the original plan to remain undisrupted.
NASA officials have expressed openness to flying a different type of mission. We will probably learn more about the nature of Artemis 3 later this year.
10. Chinese lunar landing (2029)
China has some ambitious plans for human spaceflight in this decade, besides visiting the Tiangong space station. According to a preliminary plan released by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) on Wednesday, China plans to land its taikonauts on the moon before 2030 to carry out scientific exploration. The plan is to launch two carrier rockets to send a lunar lander and a manned spacecraft to a lunar orbit, respectively. The taikonauts will then enter the lander and descend to the moon’s surface, where they will collect samples and conduct experiments. After completing their tasks, they will return to the spacecraft in orbit and head back to Earth.
China has not announced explicit plans to land its own taikonauts on the lunar surface but it has likely been working on it diligently and quietly.
But that’s not all
These are simply individual missions and only missions that have a crew onboard and will launch people. There are many exciting things to look out for besides these.
For instance, it’s worth keeping an eye on Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin’s suborbital tourism flights which have started launching once a month. Meanwhile, Rocket Lab will launch its Neutron rocket, a Falcon 9 equivalent, and may one day take up astronauts! Similarly, Boeing is developing the Starliner capsule that will take astronauts to the ISS alongside the Crew Dragon and Blue Origin is developing it’s New Glenn megarocket, a Starship competitor, along with ULA’s competitor — Vulcan Centaur, which will launch the Dream Chaser space plane sending cargo and even people to the ISS.
Countless other ventures from robotic probes that will land on faraway worlds to mixed-use business parks suspended in orbit to the commercial equivalent of the space shuttle. These are the challenges we face to expand into outer space, cheering those that take them on and facilitating ever more complex technological development for an eventual mission to Mars.
Thanks for reading!
